


Normal

by Lucy Gillam (cereta)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-27
Updated: 2010-09-27
Packaged: 2017-10-12 06:17:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,665
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/121739
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cereta/pseuds/Lucy%20Gillam
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Thanks to way2busymom and lydiabell for the betas, and esorlehcar for the read-through.</p><p>This was written for Wa, who supplied the idea.</p></blockquote>





	Normal

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Wa](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Wa).



It wasn't that campus security didn't believe the three frat boys started the fight. That, they had no problem with. The trio already had a few complaints against them, and this latest incident was likely to be the straw that pushed them from warning to suspension. Who started what with whom was really not the issue.

The issue was more Frat Boy #1's broken nose, Frat Boy #2's badly-injured-probably-broken-but-we'll-wait-for-the-x-rays arm, and Frat boy #3's…well, let's just say the guy hadn't stopped crying yet, and while the campus cops would normally have rolled their eyes at a 250+ pound bully crying over a non-visible injury, the way the guy was curled over and the place his hands were cupped made them wince in sympathy instead.

Sam had a small bruise on his right cheekbone. Lucky punch.

"Karate," the guy apparently in charge said to Sam. It wasn't exactly a question.

"Yes, sir." Sam never thought he'd be grateful for that phrase being an autonomic response, but it was doing wonders in this conversation.

"As a kid." It was still not a question.

"Well, all the way through high school." Sam cast a stray thought to any luck entity or stray deity that happened to be listening that the cop wasn't into Martial Arts, because there was no way he could bullshit his way through the belt system. Still, he didn't think, "my Dad and a priest and few other people taught me and my brother to kick ass, mostly not for fighting humans, admittedly" would go over at this particular juncture.

Sometimes – not often, but sometimes – he really missed his brother's way of talking himself out of stuff like this. Then he remembered how often Dean talked himself _into_ it in the first place.

The officer (Lowry, his name tag said) sighed and closed his notebook. "All right, son. We'll be contacting you about charges."

Sam had to swallow his instinctive, "No, really." Because a normal, up-and-coming Stanford senior would press charges against a group of thugs who jumped him on his way home from the library because he, quote, looked like a queer, unquote.

"Sure. Of course," he said instead. "And thanks." What exactly he was thanking the guy for, he wasn't sure, but it was the kind of thing people said in these situations.

 _Normal's really hard, isn't it, dude?_

Sam told the Dean in his head to shut up as he walked back to the apartment he shared with Jess.

***

"Kung fu dude!"

Well, so much for hoping it wouldn't get around. Judging from the way Luis was practically vibrating with stored-up commentary, it had gotten around plenty.

Sam never thought he'd miss the way Dean managed to zing him out of nowhere. Who knew seeing it coming was worse?

"Don't start, man," Sam said as he slid into the booth.

"Dude!" Luis continued undeterred. "All this time, you never mentioned you were Bruce Lee." He pretended to look at Sam carefully. "Actually, you do kinda got his hair."

Sam just rolled his eyes.

"Leave him alone, Luis," Jess said, more in her I-don't-expect-this-to-help tone, rather than her No-really-cut-it-out tone. Although, in fairness, the second tone only worked about thirty percent of the time, anyway. Jess blamed this on the fact that Sam hadn't grown up with a mother. Sam blamed it on the fact that her authoritative tone just wasn't all that authoritative. Not that he'd ever actually say that. To her, anyway.

His only class of the day was statistics, which he really couldn't afford not to pay attention in, since the whole relationship-of-numbers-to-the-real-world didn't exactly come naturally to him. This made him seriously question his thoughts about business law, but he had time to make that decision. The only thing he knew now was that he was staying as far away from estate law as he possibly could. That would be just asking for trouble.

"…a pen?"

The whisper made Sam jump a little, which in turn made the guy in the next seat (whose name Sam had completely failed to learn over the course of five weeks) look at him a little funny, but the guy just held up his pen.

"Mine's dead. Got one I can borrow?"

"Uh, yeah, sure." Sam fished out a spare pen and handed it over. It had taken him several months after leaving Dad and Dean to stop noticing how often the words "dead" and "death" came up in everyday, non-monster-and-ghost –related discussion, but he had stopped finally. Usually.

The drone of Professor Morrell's voice continued. Sam dutifully took notes for the rest of the lecture, although he wasn't optimistic that he'd understand them the next day.

It wasn't so much the incident itself. Okay, it had taken him a while to get used to the idea that when you weren't actively _looking_ for monsters, it was really people you had to watch out for, and really, most of them weren't all that dangerous. And okay, so he'd spent maybe five seconds hearing Dad bark at him for letting his guard down, but he hadn't, not really. He'd handled the guys pretty easily, actually.

Which didn't really make him feel better. It's not that he _wanted_ to get the shit beat out of him, but most guys, most _normal_ guys would have run as soon as they had a hole in the action. A _normal_ guy wouldn't have made sure all three were put down.

 _Dude, normal hell,_ his brother's voice was only too happy to argue. _You think some client who thinks he was stiffed is never gonna key your car? You think that Karate Kid shit is gonna cover it when you run across something you can't explain to the cops who aren't as overworked and underpaid as those guys? Or to Jessica?_

Except…explaining it to Jess hadn't been the problem, either. She'd fussed over his bruise, teased him about protecting his pretty face, because they both knew she was with him for his looks, and taken his "I took a little martial arts as a kid" without a single question. Okay, so she'd gotten used to getting little nuggets of his childhood like that, had more or less accepted that he didn't much like talking about it, so there were things she didn't know, and therefore just kind of took him at his word when he fumbled about school papers to explain how he knew the guy on the TV show had been wrong about the type of gun.

And that _really_ didn't make him feel better. Actually, it kind of made him feel like shit.

"Here, thanks, man."

Sam started again, only to see a pen being held out in front of his face. The rest of the class was packing up, or already on the way out, and his seatmate was handing back the pen.

"Oh. Sure, any time." Sam shoved his books into his bag as people walked out around him.

"You should get some sleep," the guy said as he left.

"Yeah, thanks."

 _We do what we do and we don't tell anyone._

He didn't need Dean's voice, or Dad's voice, for that one. He didn't need _anyone_ to tell him why Jess shouldn't know about … everything. Anything. There were a thousand reasons why she should _never_ know about it. Even if he had started thinking about rings, about how he could afford something as nice as what she deserved, about how and when he could ask her, she didn't need to know, _couldn't_ know. It was a bad idea, and a stupid, random attack on a stupid, random night by some stupid, random guys didn't change that. They were going to build a life together, a nice, happy, _normal_ life.

A life he'd spend lying to the woman he loved.

Shit.

No, he wasn't going to tell her. He _wasn't_. Okay, so maybe it was time to lay some things out, but there had to be a way to explain that look, my mom was murdered and it really fucked my dad up, and it sort of fucked us up, and that's how I know about guns and how to put down something bigger and stronger than me. Like a bad guy, or an intruder, or a werewolf.

Shit.

 _Gonna have to make a decision, dude. A lie's a lie's a lie._

The fact that his brother could continue to drive him batshit when he wasn't even _here_ was just really, really not fair. The fact that he was right was just infuriating.

Sam ran a hand over his eyes as he climbed the steps to their apartment. He didn't have to make a decision right now. He was wiped, and he had the late shift in the library again tonight, and he could really go for a nap and maybe a pizza when Jess got back from her afternoon class.

"Check your email, right now!"

Except Jess wasn't _at_ her afternoon class, but standing in their living room. Or, rather, bouncing up and down in their living room.

"Okay, I _swear_ I wasn't reading your email, I was just looking up directions to that Italian place and you know how my computer's been acting up, but I saw the message and the sender name before I could open the new tab, now will you _check_ it already?"

Even before Sam moved the mouse to activate the monitor, his stomach was in knots. He could think of one, maybe two things that could get Jess this excited, and since she hadn't bugged him about his long-lost family recently, it pretty much had to be…

From: LSAC SCORE , Re: Your June 2005 LSAT Score

Sam clicked, and his eyes immediately fell on one number, the number that laid out his whole future, his whole planned, complete, blessedly _normal_ future.

"Well? Well?" Jess said, her jitters apparent even out of the corner of Sam's eye.

"I think," Sam said slowly, "I'm going to law school."

~~~

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to way2busymom and lydiabell for the betas, and esorlehcar for the read-through.
> 
> This was written for Wa, who supplied the idea.


End file.
